Something that is unique (as far as I know) in FF: Resonance is the addition of "visions" that you will acquire a lot of as you progress through the game. These are basically skill sets that can be equipped by any character and the idea is that you can change your party's skills to accommodate any area and the various weaknesses that the enemies might have at the time.
For example, in the desert areas that you enter the enemies tend to be weak to water skills but only one of your characters has any of these skills "built in" to their character's skills. You can change this by equipping visions for some or all of your characters. The same can be done with healing skills since only one of your characters has a healing skill that is worth bothering to use unless you equip the vision that can give any of your characters the ability to heal.
Getting visions is really easy. You see a cave that has a blue light emitting from it, you walk in, fight zero fights, and then see a crystal at the end of a short hallway that is always the same and then interact with it.
When I first started encountering these caves I was pretty excited because it really evolved the game to give you more skills to play around with.
However, you start to see these caves I would say too frequently and it can be kind of overwhelming to keep up with all of it. I have been in many battles and am looking at my screen with a sense of confusion because I don't know what any of my characters' equipped skills happen to be at the time. Often, the "wrong" vision is equipped and that person now becomes rather useless for the remainder of the fight.
Of course since there are a plethora of save points in this and every other Final Fantasy game you always have the chance to abandon the fight and change out your skills but this doesn't change the real point that I am trying to make here.
There are 26 visions in total and to me, this is actually starting to become too much of what I am doing in an overall sense.
When you equip a vision, you are working towards upgrading it for that individual character. When it levels up, you will get some bonuses, some of which are permanent bonuses to things like strength, HP, MP, you know... stuff like that. These can normally be accomplished rather quickly and if you want to grind you can just run over to some earlier area where you don't actually need to be skilled at all to win and go from battle to battle.
I prefer to not grind if I can help it of course.
I do like the visions, I just kind of wonder if they maybe put a bit too many of them in there. Each one of them comes along with something like 18 skills and I don't know what 26x18 is, but it is a number that is much higher than the amount of things that I can remember with my little pea brain.
one thing that i don't think is a spoiler but is good to know is that when you are being asked questions by the crystal voice about the vision you are about to acquire it makes absolutely no difference how you answer these. I was putting a lot of thought into this when I first started doing it because I thought it would have some effect on the skills or something like that depending on if you answered "correctly" or not.
As it turns out it doesn't matter how you answer these questions... any of them... there is no right or wrong in this and no matter how you answer the questions, even if you pick intentionally bad answers, the vision will be exactly the same.
For me, I guess I am glad the visions are in the game but it kind of ends up taking more of your time than actually playing the main story... and I don't know if that is a good thing.
